In a cost-benefit analysis scenario, we measure the balance between how much we put in with how much we get out. A few examples are provided below:

  1. With $50, we can order food that is made by a service other than our own in order to reach an ideal taste preference of X or we can spend less than $50 to use our own services to reach a similar result.

  2. With $100, we can use an LLM to generate tokens and create software that reaches an ideal user experience preference of X or we can spend less than $100 to negotiate reduced token usage in combination with our planned optimization strategy in order to reach a similar result.

  3. With $250, we can have a service fix a home repair after reviewing the issue at a quality of X or we can spend less than $250 to fix the repair ourselves in order to reach a similar quality.

There are endless examples of this balance between how much we outsource the service against how much we work on the service as time, skills and budget are considered the main costs of concern.

There is a tendency that if one has enough of a budget, they should outsource the service as it is a form of participatory transaction in the economy, but sometimes this goes far enough in the thought process that balanced strategies become disassociated with the potential to complete the service ourselves.

It should be noted that for some of us, we have limitations that reduce our ability to self-service on various strategies but that doesn’t assume that everyone has the same limitations on all strategies. Given this distribution, how many of us are able to consider rebalancing our service outsourcing versus not, and when does a budget require additional resources versus when does it not?

Further, can we extract a system such that we do increase transactions but reduce external servicing such that it affects budget limitations, while also maintaining minimal input and maximal output? How much is a desire versus a necessity and when do those two worlds merge to be conflated as the same input/output strategy? Conflation is not an objective truth but an illusion of memetic feedback loops. In that scenario, finding the balance becomes a skill of discerning signal from noise. That is the real work we aim to find between our embodied system and the interaction with other systems.